Originally I thought this was another one of those dumb excuses people on here use to discredit people, saying they have AIDS. However, it does seem like Jobs has AIDS. I don't know the full story, so I can't say what he really has.

A lot of you may not like Apple, but their products are superior to many manufacturers. Compare the Macbook Pro to Dell/Compaq/Sony/IBM laptops, and the Macbook will stand the test of time, while the others will struggle with hardware components failing.

A lot of you may not like Apple, but their products are superior to many manufacturers. Compare the Macbook Pro to Dell/Compaq/Sony/IBM laptops, and the Macbook will stand the test of time, while the others will struggle with hardware components failing.

Right. I've had my Dell for 5 years. The most that's happened? I broke the power supply (yanked it out of the wall a bit too hard) and had to get a new one. It's getting a little slower now, finally, after all this time. I suspect in a year or two I'll be wanting a new laptop. Thats 6-7 years.

Don't buy into Mac's propaganda. Their machines may look nicer, but they have comparable hardware to a PC, and actually Macs have become much more like PCs in recent years (because thats what most people are accustomed to using). Next thing you know you'll be sipping a Starbucks mocha latte while telling me how awesome Regina Spektor is.

A lot of you may not like Apple, but their products are superior to many manufacturers. Compare the Macbook Pro to Dell/Compaq/Sony/IBM laptops, and the Macbook will stand the test of time, while the others will struggle with hardware components failing.

Right. I've had my Dell for 5 years. The most that's happened? I broke the power supply (yanked it out of the wall a bit too hard) and had to get a new one. It's getting a little slower now, finally, after all this time. I suspect in a year or two I'll be wanting a new laptop. Thats 6-7 years.

Don't buy into Mac's propaganda. Their machines may look nicer, but they have comparable hardware to a PC, and actually Macs have become much more like PCs in recent years (because thats what most people are accustomed to using). Next thing you know you'll be sipping a Starbucks mocha latte while telling me how awesome Regina Spektor is.

Glad to hear about your success. Although I must say, all people who I know who have had macs in the past, have never reported it breaking down. I am really surprised to hear about your Dell, because I work with many types of equipment (dell/ibm/sony), and they don't last very long.

Glad to hear about your success. Although I must say, all people who I know who have had macs in the past, have never reported it breaking down. I am really surprised to hear about your Dell, because I work with many types of equipment (dell/ibm/sony), and they don't last very long.

It's all about how you treat the machine. I know how my laptop works quite well, and I've taken the time to learn how to recover it if it ever does crash.

You can't download a bunch of bullshit and constantly futz around your computer without doing regular cleanups. I use CCCleaner, Spybot, Mcaffee, and AVG Security to keep my laptop as clean as possible.

Although I must say, all people who I know who have had macs in the past, have never reported it breaking down.

I've used and owned Macs in the past. As with all manufacturers, quality results vary between models. Many of Apple's machines were not built or designed by Apple, and as a result, are OK.

However, I'd like you to look around and see how many 7 year old Macs you see out there that have faced any kind of heavy use. (Any machine will endure a decade of very light use.)

Even more, my beef with Apple is not the quality of their hardware -- which I have seen is often a product of their shoddy design as a result of business decisions, not technical ones -- but their inconsistency as a company and their corrupt business model of selling hipster-friendly, pseudo-functional computers and then claiming they are a cultural trend. Have you ever noticed how Apple users are reluctant to criticize Apple for anything? How even when their machines fail, they're sure the solution is more hardware? How they pay for new machines with greater frequency than PC users because Macs have, for 20 years now, not been upgradable for under the cost of a new machine?

It's a neurotic company selling an identity to neurotic people. That alone is a big problem. Secondary problem: they have no consistent strategy. This means backward compatibility is not good, nor is stability of the operating system, nor is stability of the hardware. They invent a new paradigm every fifteen minutes in order to maintain the appearance of being cutting edge -- but in technical terms, it's the exact same equipment as a Dell (built in most cases by the same people who built it for Dell).

If you think Macintosh is better, you fell for the advertising.

I can't say I'm blown away by Dell, HP or others. You'd do better to build a whitebox and use good components -- at this point, it's now more expensive than buying an off-the-shelf HP or Dell, but you get a better, faster, more stable machine (and save a few hours deleting junkware from it).

It's a neurotic company selling an identity to neurotic people. That alone is a big problem. Secondary problem: they have no consistent strategy. This means backward compatibility is not good, nor is stability of the operating system, nor is stability of the hardware. They invent a new paradigm every fifteen minutes in order to maintain the appearance of being cutting edge -- but in technical terms, it's the exact same equipment as a Dell (built in most cases by the same people who built it for Dell).

If you think Macintosh is better, you fell for the advertising.

Exactly. Ironic that the very people they're competing against may manufacture the computers they're advertising. Just adds up to a bunch of lols.

A lot of you may not like Apple, but their products are superior to many manufacturers. Compare the Macbook Pro to Dell/Compaq/Sony/IBM laptops, and the Macbook will stand the test of time, while the others will struggle with hardware components failing.

Right. I've had my Dell for 5 years. The most that's happened? I broke the power supply (yanked it out of the wall a bit too hard) and had to get a new one. It's getting a little slower now, finally, after all this time. I suspect in a year or two I'll be wanting a new laptop. Thats 6-7 years.

Don't buy into Mac's propaganda. Their machines may look nicer, but they have comparable hardware to a PC, and actually Macs have become much more like PCs in recent years (because thats what most people are accustomed to using). Next thing you know you'll be sipping a Starbucks mocha latte while telling me how awesome Regina Spektor is.

Glad to hear about your success. Although I must say, all people who I know who have had macs in the past, have never reported it breaking down. I am really surprised to hear about your Dell, because I work with many types of equipment (dell/ibm/sony), and they don't last very long.

There's a degree of self-fulfilling prophecy involved here. Mac products are expensive, and tend to be purchased by people with slightly more experience as computer users. The target demographic for Dell and other manufacturers of cheaper off-the-shelf Windows machines is novice users on a budget: precisely the people most likely to do the things that inevitably shorten the life of components. There's no question that a competently constructed home-built windows machine in the hands of a user who doesn't abuse their equipment will outlast and outperform a Mac for far, far less money. It might not look as pretty on the desk, but it will do more for less, and do it longer.

I've seen way too many academics of science with apple laptops, if you go to a conference then expect 75+% of people to do presentations on a macbook. All of the compatibility problems that I've seen at conferences have come from mac users that forgot to bring the correct adaptor, or for some other reason the link just didn't work. That does not endear me to buy one. The presentations were quite flashy though, I almost thought I was watching a hollywood blockbuster.

Speaking of heavy usage, I known of no computer simulation that is done on a Mac. All simulations are done on computers operating Unix/Linux and maybe in small scale cases using Windows, architecture varies from pentium to duo-core to vector CPUs that companies like Sun produce. I suppose you could claim that the reason macs are not used is because they capture so little of the market but I'm less inclined to believe that.

Ironic that the very people they're competing against may manufacture the computers they're advertising. Just adds up to a bunch of lols.

I need a big list somewhere of "signs that your country is failing." One of them is this: we manufacture almost no computer equipment here. It all comes from 10-12 companies scattered through Asia, concentrated in Taiwan, Korea and Japan.

American companies re-brand it and pick components, but that's about it. Hilariously, all of the chips are designed here and many of them made here, however (exception is RAM).

I am not impressed by computers. They're primitive and their operating systems are primitive. That includes UNIX.

The real grab that Windows has on us all is that the software we need to run to get things done without it being a huge pain in the ass... all runs on Windows. But that's fitting. We only have computers as good as the ones we have now because Windows unified and standardized the desktop.

Macintosh is a boutique brand. It's popular now, but they always go through phases of popular/unpopular when they hit on something good, and then slowly get more and more neurotic until they kill it.

I can't say I'm blown away by Dell, HP or others. You'd do better to build a whitebox and use good components -- at this point, it's now more expensive than buying an off-the-shelf HP or Dell, but you get a better, faster, more stable machine (and save a few hours deleting junkware from it).

It's worth noting that if you're a student, the "build it yourself" route is likely to be cheaper, since you can get the OS, Office software, etc. for dirt cheap (when I built my current machine four years ago, I was able to get Windows XP for $20 on a student discount, and Office for $10). The real place where you'd save money by going with Dell is that they've got a mass-licensing deal with Windows on the software, thus preventing you from having to pay $200 or so for a copy.

It's worth noting that if you're a student, the "build it yourself" route is likely to be cheaper, since you can get the OS, Office software, etc. for dirt cheap (when I built my current machine four years ago, I was able to get Windows XP for $20 on a student discount, and Office for $10). The real place where you'd save money by going with Dell is that they've got a mass-licensing deal with Windows on the software, thus preventing you from having to pay $200 or so for a copy.

Problem is, I'm not particularly tech-savvy. At least when it comes to building computers. Though I would love to learn, I'd need someone to teach me.